Death is rarely something to be celebrated, but I can’t say I shed a tear last week when I heard that Milton Friedman, the father of neoliberal economics, had gone to the great free market in the sky.more...

The East India Company was the first multinational corporation - until its abuse of power caused a public backlash. Nick Robins examines its legacy to reveal how it set the corporate blueprint for today's firms to operate uncheckedmore...

'I can no longer sit back and allow terrorist infiltration, terrorist indoctrination, terrorist subversion, and the international terrorist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.' Commander George the Ripper Bush at Madison Square Gardenmore...

In the past 50 years the global economy has grown by over 500 per cent... the richest fifth of the world now earn 86 per cent of global income… the poorest fifth earn just 1.3 per cent… life expectancy in the world’s most ‘developed’ countries is 79 years… in the least ‘developed’ it is still just 42… we consume 22 million tonnes of oil every day… chop down 1 per cent of the world’s forests every year… and have killed 90 per cent of the world’s big fish. Has the time come to give up on globalisation?more...

I’m sitting opposite the large Coca-Cola bottling plant next to the village of Plachimada in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Plachimada is a farming village of about 800 families, many of them tribal. The ugly factory looks rather out of place in such a beautiful setting, the Western Ghats mountains clearly visible in the distance.more...

Ladakh is framed by the Karakoram mountains to the north and the Himalayas to the south. Yet even in this remote environment the forces of global consumerism are intruding. Nicola Graydon reports on the locals' inspiring defence of their culturemore...

Locked out of some meetings. Not even invited to others. And then all the decisions are made after you’ve left. It’s all in a day’s work for ‘developing’ World delegates at the WTO. By Mark Lynas
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Free trade. So benign sounding a phrase. A concept whose principles no reasonable person would challenge. Trouble is, free trade as we know it – free trade as it is pushed by those who will mass at Cancun, Mexico, in September – is far from free. Think about it. If it truly was free, would they put sanctions on those who don’t want to participate and use police to violently put down protests by those who oppose it? Free trade is really just a euphemism, like ‘peacekeeping’ or ‘forest management’, that hides a far uglier, more brutal reality. Free trade is a brand – Free Trade™, which sells a repackaged product no one in their right minds would buy if they knew what it really was.more...

School dinners by McDonald’s. Corporations taking countries to court because their environmental regulations are ‘too tough’. The BBC sold to Rupert Murdoch. Paul Kingsnorth explains why we should be very worried by what is about to go on behind the closed doors of Cancun.more...

For all its obsession with international terrorism, Washington fails to see how the phenomenon is driven by its own model of globalisation – a model that is itself uniquely vulnerable to terrorist attacks. Fritjof Capra on security and sustainabilitymore...

You can ‘structurally adjust’ an economy in a matter of years, but it takes longer to destroy a culture. Heiner Thiessen reports from Senegal on the impact of imposing a Western cash economy on a traditional African barter society
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By using taxpayers' money to back environmentally-destructive projects around the world, ECAs are lining the pockets of multinational companies at the expense of the planet. Export credit agencies, explains Simon Retallack, are the worlds largest public financiers of environmental destruction. more...